In a recent panel at the Book Industry Study Group’s annual meeting, Penguin Random House COO Madeline McIntosh called the international market potential “massive,” noting that the sale of e-books will not depend on local infrastructures, which historically have been too weak in many countries to support sales of print books. To take advantage of growth opportunities, various players have set up systems to help facilitate international e-book sales.

Thanks to Nate at The Digital Reader for sending my way two stories in as many days about the digital textbook issue. In the first, he outlines some reasons behind the ‘growing resistance’ to digital textbooks, including poor navigation features, inadequate study extras and internet requirements which limit student use. In the second, he profiles a North Carolina school district whose difficulty with the actual devices pre-empted any further use, textbook or otherwise.

The Good And Bad In Chaotic eBook Pricing Techdirt (blog) For years we've discussed the ridiculousness of ebook pricing, where some publishers seem to think that sky high prices for ebooks (often higher than physical copies) makes sense, despite...

Universities and school districts across the US are adopting digital textbooks in droves, but as students use this latest educational panacea more and more are reporting that it does not live up to the hype.

Many of those who are actually using the textbooks are questioning whether there is any real value to digital textbooks or whether older methods will still work better.

For example, last week a student journalist with Carnegie Mellon University’s The Tartanstudent newspaper reported that he found that school’s online textbook platforms to be less useful than pen on paper.

Recorded books are now a billion-dollar business, which Amazon dominates perhaps like none other.

Marianela Camacho Alfaro's insight:

"If you are a fan of audiobooks -- and the numbers of people who say they are has grown impressively in recent years -- the odds are that Amazon is your preferred place to shop. Of all the ways Amazon has come to dominate the book market, especially in the digital arena, its share of audiobook sales probably represents its most formidable pre-eminence.

At the last tally (now more than a year old), more than 60 percent of audiobooks were downloaded to digital devices, and nearly all of those came from Audible (an Amazon company) or through its long-standing license to supply audiobooks to Apple's iTunes. Amazon also owns Brilliance audio, the biggest producer of CD-based audiobooks. Audiobooks are now well over a billion-dollar business, and the available figures suggest that Amazon retains a far larger piece of that revenue than any other retailer."

Any device that is tethered to the cloud could have its contents changed at the request of a publisher, author or angry subject

Marianela Camacho Alfaro's insight:

"Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries. Though you can read a book through, say, Google Books, or on a Nook or Kindle, it's laborious to save what you see to your computer and truly make the book your own. With cloud-based services, one "master" copy of the book is always online, but that makes it vulnerable to manipulation or even deletion."

In spite of the spectacular growth of ebooks in 2008 to 2011, we all know that eventually the ride would come to a stop as the growth of ebook market share slowed. TBH I didn't expect it to happen so quickly.

In the online space, there are a number of challenges for publishers to navigate – and the two that come up most frequently are, how can I keep my readers engaged and interested when there are so many other channels competing for their attention?

"E-book royalties have been fixed at around 25% for a few years now. The unanimous position of publishers has been that that was what was affordable.

I've generally left this topic alone because a) it was well-covered elsewhere and b) I was prepared to accept pro-tem that the digital transition was expensive, that it had arrived rather suddenly (if you allow a definition of "suddenly" which embraces "a lot of people were telling you about it and you chose not to believe them"), and that no one would actually be daft enough to try to deceive the golden goose about the availability of grain.

Because sooner or later—especially in an environment where grain sources are becoming less centralised and where the flow of grain is scrutinised rather intensely—the goose was going to find out and might get a bit pissy. Geese are almost as sensitive about grain as they are about unanticipated Gaulish invaders."

"Yesterday Books-a-Million announced plans to install an Espresso Book Machine (EBM) in one of their stores.The pilot store will be located in Portland, Maine, and plans are in the works to place a second EBM in another location.

The Espresso Book Machine is a self-contained print ship which enables customers to order books from a catalog and have the books printed while the customer is waiting. It takes just a few minutes to produce a book, and the EBM can print anything from a MMPB to a trade PB sized book."

I don’t get why anti-Amazon people get up in arms whenever they find an author who links to the Amazon pages for their books. Or whenever a publisher out there seems to favour the Seattle Beh...

Marianela Camacho Alfaro's insight:

"Even if every publisher, every author, and every editor out there studiously avoided sending traffic to Amazon in any way, that wouldn’t even cause a measurable dent in Amazon’s book or ebook revenue.

People go to Amazon, they aren’t sent there.

Pointing people anywhere else will only result in lower affiliate fees for the author or publisher as people follow the link, close the tab, and then go to Amazon directly to buy it there anyway."

The 'Other' E-Book Pricing Problem Huffington Post While the e-book world takes a minute to digest the court ruling finding Apple conspired with book publishers to jack up the price of e-books to consumers, it's worth noting that there is another...

"The three charts in succession were designed to demonstrate that the old digital book standard, EPUB 2, couldn’t cope with illustrated non-fiction titles and certainly not children’s books. Only adult fiction ebooks climbed above their print brethren (although not above all three formats combined). EPUB 3 is hugely more versatile, and hence worth BISG’s efforts to track its adoption.

What I find remarkable about the three charts is the overall victory of ebooks against print. Generally all print categories are trending downwards. Only ebooks are consistently are a sharp upward curve. Whatever the total sales, ebooks were the only sure bet from 2008 to 2012. And for the future?"

Could authors tap into crowdsourcing networks for help with mundane and time-consuming (and expensive) tasks like cover design, book layout, and editing? (Crowdsourced Editing: The Future of Self-Publishing?

Should tablets replace textbooks in K-12 schools? (RT @procon_org: K-12 textbook publishing is an $8 billion industry; 3 companies run about 85% of the market.

Marianela Camacho Alfaro's insight:

"Proponents of tablets say that they are supported by most teachers and students, are much lighter than print textbooks, and improve standardized test scores. They say tablets can hold hundreds of textbooks, save the environment by lowering the amount of printing, increase student interactivity and creativity, and that digital textbooks are cheaper than print textbooks."

eBook prices in Canada are not dropping in step with price decreases in the US

Marianela Camacho Alfaro's insight:

"While readers in the US may be benefiting from a drop in eBook prices following settlement of the Apple eBook price fixing case, Canadians are not sharing in the benefit of declining eBook prices.

Laura Hazard Owen reported yesterday that retailers have begun cutting eBook prices in response to the settlement of the Apple eBook price fixing case. Her post included a table comparing prices at which certain books are offered by the various major eBook retailers in the US.

I focused on the fact that my favourite eBook seller, Kobo, was the highest priced seller in all examples. I tweeted about this and was promptly called out by Jennifer Fox."

"It may be sacrilegious and antithetical to everything libraries stand for (and as librarians, we appreciate this more than most), but we ardently believe it nevertheless: libraries should get into the business of selling books. Now. The crisis in Canada’s once vibrant book industry is negatively affecting our reading lives and communities. Growing evidence suggests that the increasing dominance of big corporations and discount giants is resulting in less diversity of ideas."

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